Doctor Johnson's Autopsy, or Anecdotal Immortality

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The anecdote, let us provisionally remark, as the narration of a single event, is the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real. (1)

Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote"

But I shall rather stop here to consider the thoughts which of themselves spring up in my mind, and which were not inspired by anything beyond my own nature alone when I applied myself to the consideration of my being. In the first place, then, I considered myself as having a face, hands, arms, and all that system of members composed of bones and flesh as seen in a corpse which I designated by the name of body. (2)

Descartes, Meditations

Wednesday, December 15, 1784: Opened the body of Dr. Samuel Johnson for Mr. Cruikshank, in the presence of Drs. Heberden, Brocklesby, Butter, Mr. C. and Mr. White. He died on the Monday evening preceding. About a week before his death Mr. C. by desire of his physicians scarified his legs and scrotum, to let out the water which collected in the cellular membrane of those parts, Dr. Johnson being very impatient to have the water entirely gone, the morning of the day on which he died repeated the operations himself, and, cutting very deep lost about ten ounces of blood[;] he used a lancet for this purpose--he was in too weak a state to survive such an apparently trifling loss. (3)

The surgeon James Wilson thus begins his record of Samuel Johnson's autopsy. In its initial hint toward a dramatic deathbed scene before turning toward a static visual description of the body's interior, Wilson's text gestures toward a story it neither begins nor properly ends. In this truncated narrative, doctor and patient compete for the use of the lancet in a joint and uncanny rendering of the great man's body as living corpse. But this particular patient was a national icon of letters, whose embodied presence was preserved in literary parts that served as anatomy's textual equivalent, namely a plethora of anecdotes. Originating at the crossroads of history and clinical science (as Joel Fineman has argued), troubling the relation between aesthetic immediacy and clinical objectivity, the anecdote haunts the surgeon's efforts at anatomical anonymity with its living particularity, just as the autopsy haunts the surgeon's "I" with a vision of himself as the bodily remnants of a famous intellect. (4)

Wilson's manuscript remains in the archives of London's Royal College of Physicians, but Johnson's autopsy has fascinated doctors enough to have had an afterlife in print. Excerpted in the Gentleman's Magazine shortly after his death in December of 1784, as well as in John Hawkins's 1787 Life, from its first verbatim appearance in the first volume of the London Medical Journal in 1849-the transcript of another medical oration by one George James Squibb (5)--to the present day, Johnson's opened body has been orated upon, imaged, puzzled over, and diagnosed in a capacious and tenacious medical literature, itself a kind of embodied double to the critical literature in which an immortal Johnson continues to inspire today's Johnsonians. (6) This opened cadaver endures not only in the printed records of after-dinner lectures often delivered by those indirectly related to the doctors involved in the autopsy, not only in the "Xhumation" section of The Lancet and other historical sections of medical journals, but quit e literally (we might even say anecdotally) in preserved parts. (7)

Around the figure of Johnson's corpse, surgeon and man of letters unite in a desire to delineate and display an uncommon individual. Indeed, Johnson's body inspires a poetics of collection common to scientific and aesthetic sensibilities alike. While the surgeon William Cruikshank ordered Johnson's autopsy, it was the painter and fellow author Joshua Reynolds who visited the great man's death-bed late at night to take a mold of his face for a death mask. (8) Transformed into a bust with Cruikshank's supervision, the only known representation to display the scars of scrofula on Johnson's neck turns the autopsy's paradoxical balance of personal particularity with clinical objectivity into a curious blend of neoclassical type and aberrant detail. Reproduced in the first English translation of Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1789), when art editor Thomas Holloway chose to supplement the original two portraits of Johnson "exactly copied from the French edition," one "a general idea of the character; the other a c areful copy after a well-known portrait," with an image "engraved after a cast taken from nature, as a proof of Mr. Lavater's Physiognomical Sagacity, and a confirmation of his doctrine," this collaboration of art and science outdid both idealized and realistic portraiture in its truth to life (figure 1). (9)

Continuing the tradition of corporeally-based realism, physician and Johnsonian Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr. in an essay for the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled "Art and Medicine: Dr. Johnson's Dropsy," bases his dating of Irish wax-sculptor and royal medallion-modeler Samuel Percy's miniature portrait group of a tavern scene of Johnson and his friends as 1783 or later "entirely on medical evidence, namely the time when Dr. Johnson developed dropsy." (10) Noting the swelled legs of the "lifelike" figure, McHenry groundlessly speculates that since "the wax face of Johnson by Percy in many ways resembles" the only known bust of Johnson taken from life by Joseph Nollekens, "hence, it too may have been taken from life." (11) Percy, renowned for the vividness of his portraits made from molds taken from the sitter, then tinted and ornamented with "little touches such as lace, flowers, comb, ring or jewels," also had a "lucrative sideline," advertised as "Masks taken from the dead on the shortest no tice and likenesses made from them." (12) The figure of Johnson, in the opinion of recent experts, turns out to be neither, but McHenry's desire to imagine his embodied presence is powerful enough to martial medical evidence in the service of fantasy. In all these examples, clinical attention to the corpse unites with the aesthetic fantasy of reanimating a John son "taken from life."

Fascination with Johnson's body thus unites aesthetic and medical forms of knowledge and narrative in what Jonathan Sawday has called (in reference to an earlier period) an autoptic vision that penetrates the other in order to see itself. (13) Johns Bender has linked the "technical practices of the eighteenth-century novel to anatomical science," revealing a violence that undergirds the eighteenth-century narrative construction of sympathy and self-regulating subjectivity. …

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